Drive for clean air in Delhi skids to a halt

While a fortnight of limiting vehicles on the road might not have led to a permanent relief, what is worrying is that there is no urgency to proceed with the larger policy interventions conceived to help clean the capital's air.Jayashree Nandi | TNN | July 01, 2016, 08:00 IST

NEW DELHI: It is fairly clear now that the Delhi government's road restriction scheme in April didn't bring any significant decrease in pollution levels. While a fortnight of limiting vehicles on the road might not have led to a permanent relief, what is worrying is that there is no urgency to proceed with the larger policy interventions conceived to help clean the capital's air.

One example is the plan to have at least 3,000 buses on the roads. None has arrived and tenders for only a thousand have been floated so far.

A handy resource for anti-pollution measures would have been the substantial sum collected as environment compensation charge (ECC) from trucks entering the city. Around Rs 188 crore had accumulated till April.

As for the augmentation of the bus fleet, transport department officials do not have an explicit time frame for the arrival even of the thousand buses that have been tendered for.

"About 50 may come very soon. The rest may come in batches of hundred in the next six to 10 months," ventured an official. Delhi Transport Corporation currently has 3,938 buses. There are 1,490 cluster buses. Together they fall far short of the 11,000 buses that Delhi is reckoned to need. And yet, as the official admitted, "We haven't tendered for the rest of the buses yet."Among other measures to contain pollution, Delhi government was to have promoted the use of the Swachh Delhi app to receive complaints of "visibly polluting" vehicles for the transport department to track and punish. Neither the urban development department nor the transport department were able to provide details of how close to implementation the plan is.

In a similarly lackadaisical manner, the pollution potential of Rajghat and Badarpur thermal power plants has been swept under the carpet, despite an IIT Kanpur study and another by International Energy Agency underlining the need to shut both of them down. An official of the National Thermal Power Corporation said the Badarpur station would not be shuttered because after renovation it now met Delhi Pollution Control Committee's emission standards.

A storage pond at Badapur filled with 250 lakh metric tonnes of fly ash is a pollution hazard that will remain so for the next four or five years. "We are discussing the use of the fly ash in the eastern peripheral expressway and other road projects, but the pond is too large to be exhausted quickly," an NTPC official said.

The recent improvement in Delhi's ranking in the World Health Organization's urban air quality database shouldn't push Delhi into complacency, opined experts. Delhi ranked 11th among 3,000 cities in 103 countries in terms of PM 2.5 (very fine polluting particulate matter) levels after having had the worst placing in 2014. But as analysts pointed out, the improvement was more the result of how the air pollution was assessed this time rather than actual change in air quality.

"The government has listed what it intends to do about pollution, but very little has really been done," pointed out Anumita Roy Chowdhury, head of Centre for Science and Environment's Clean Air Campaign. "It needs to have a strategy, but if this is the pace of change, we will not be ready even by this winter." She added that boosting public transport and building pedestrian and cycling infrastructure were crucial to the battle against pollution. Alas, in all these, Delhi government seems to be in no hurry.

Prices of most SUVs were cut between Rs 1.1 lakh and Rs 3 lakh following the implementation of GST, which subsumed over a dozen central and state levies like excise duty, service tax, and VAT from July 1.